Keith Jenkins

A postmodern reply to Perez Zagorin

This article engages with the arguments forwarded by Perez Zagorin against the possible consequences of postmodernism for history as it is currently conceived of particularly in its “proper” professional/academic form (“History, the Referent, and Narrative: Reflections on Postmodernism Now,”History and Theory 38 [1999], 1-24). In an overtly positioned response which issues from a close reading of Zagorins text, I argue that his all-too-typical misunderstandings of postmodernism need to be “corrected”—not, however, to make postmodernism less of a threat to “history as we have known it,” or to facilitate the assimilation of its useful elements while exorcising its “extremes.” My “corrections” instead forward the claim that, understood positively and integrated into those conditions of postmodernity which postmodernism variously articulates at the level of theory, such theory signals the possible “end of history,” not only in its metanarrative styles (which are already becoming increasingly implausible) but also in that particular and peculiar professional genre Zagorin takes as equivalent to history per se. And I want to argue that if this theory is understood in ways which choose not to give up (as Derrida urges us not to give up) the “discourse of emancipation” after the failure of its first attempt in the “experiment of modernity,” then this ending can be considered “a good thing.”

Why Bother with the Past? Engaging with some issues raised by the possible ‘end of history as we have known it’

Abstract It seems rather obvious to say that perhaps the main reason why historians study the past is because they consider that what this work may produce ‐ a historical consciousness ‐ is a good thing. But today, beyond this minimalist intention, common endeavour and agreement collapse. For given that it is the idea of the good which defines the desired type of consciousness; that is, if a good historical consciousness is anything the definer so stipulates (which it is) then because ‘we’ live amongst so many competing (democratic) notions of the good with no neutral (foundational) criteria for adjudication between them, so not only does the ultimate closure of the good become endlessly deferred, but the very idea of a good historical consciousness is similarly affected: we now have no clear sense of what a good history/historical consciousness looks like. There are various reactions to this ‘relativist’ conclusion, but perhaps the most popular is not to try (and keep on trying) to find a ‘real history/h...

‘Nobody does it better’: radical history and Hayden White

This article is divided into two uneven parts. In the first the author outlines what he calls ‘the conditions of possibility’ for a radical history which will keep historical representations, hopefully, at work for political emancipation and empowerment of a left-wing kind. In the second part he sketches out how this ‘position’ relates to his reading of Hayden White.

Inventing the new from the old – from White's ‘tropics’ to Vico's ‘topics’ (Referee's Report)

As usual, this paper arrived with the author’s name deleted, but from the references within the text it is obvious that it is written by Eelco Runia. And so, as usual, Runia’s originality, provocativeness and his polemical edge vis a vis much of the usual ‘history theory’ fare shows through: this is a clever, suggestive paper. There are two points, however, that I intend to reflect upon critically and argue with. (1) Runia’s arguments here (like, I suggest, his arguments elsewhere and especially those in History and Theory), add nothing to historical understanding qua historical understanding, i.e. to how historical representation and therefore how ‘history’ (historiography) works. In fact, Runia’s home is, I think, in the idealist/metaphysical corner of ‘memory studies’. (2) Arguably, Vico cannot do what Runia claims for him, i.e. ‘understand’ Hayden White’s idea of ‘what is realistic in all manifestly fictive [representations] of the world’. Nor can Runia’s master tropes – presence and metonymy – either add to or fix anything very much in that area. This is because White arguably does not imply by his phrase what Runia takes him to imply: a possible ‘understanding’ leading to a (possible) ‘solution’.Vico does not address (stricto sensu how could he), and neither does Runia address, the aporetic nature of White’s ‘insight’ vis-à-vis a way of ‘reading’ – to put White’s phrase in full – ‘what is fictive in all putatively realistic representations of the world, and what is realistic

On disobedient histories

I argue that what is brilliant about historians’ representations of the past is that they are always ‘failed representations’ and that this, rather than being regretted, is the ‘best thing to be hoped for’. It is to be eagerly embraced because it allows new ways of historicizing/shaping/figuring the past, ways which, without being prescriptive, are essayed in the form of ‘dispositions’ in the final section.

Cohen contra Ankersmit

No one can accuse Sande Cohen and Frank Ankersmit of writing easy books. Indeed, it may well be that the difficulty of their texts has had the affect of lessening their impact on students of history in general (construed here as all of those who produce, or intend to produce, historical works), rather than increasing it; certainly few professional/academic historians or their progeny have the taste or constitution for theorization at this level. But there are doubtless other reasons too, the most important probably being the fact that their specific theorizations make uncomfortable reading for those who populate the more traditional highways and byways of contemporary ‘history culture’, threatening it with ruin. Taken seriously, Cohen’s and Ankersmit’s texts raise critical perspectives on both the ideological functions of our history culture and the inevitable shortfall of those empirical/epistemological strivings that overwhelmingly characterize the work(s) of those who live within it. No surprise, then, that they should be relatively ignored or, if and when they are actually ‘known’, be somewhat disavowed. But as someone who is also critical of ‘traditional’ history producers and their continued allegiance to a reductive empirical/epistemological mind-set despite the intellectual/methodological bankruptcy of such a position being, by now, abundantly clear, and who reads all historical productions (including his own) as wall-to-wall theorizations governed by ideological positionings, then Cohen and Ankersmit are vital. With regard to Ankersmit, I have long been influenced by his notions of, for example, narrative logic and narrative substance, by his relatively early and relatively unequivocal championing of postmodern approaches to ‘history’, by his valorization of the aesthetic nature of history texts and to his work on intertextuality, representation, metaphor and so on: Apart from Hayden White, few others have made me stop and think, take stock of and take in, Rethinking History Vol. 12, No. 4, December 2008, 537–555

Sande Cohen: On the verge of newness

In this paper, a general introduction to the work of Sande Cohen based (primarily) on his book-length treatments of historical culture in (especially) Western capitalist social formations, the significance and relevance of Cohen is argued for by way of his indexicality with such social formations in ways suggesting that his analyses cannot be avoided by all those who genuinely aspire to understand history and historical culture today unflinchingly.

The end of the affair: On the irretrievable breakdown of history and ethics

In this paper the author argues that there never has been, and there never will be, any entailed connection between history and ethics and that this is a ‘good thing’. This is not to say that, in practice, history is not governed throughout by ‘values’ (politics, ideology, etc.) and that ethics are not always ‘historical’ and similarly ‘governed’, but that there is no ‘formal connection’. It is argued that it is this ‘break’ that enables just any kind of contingent connection to be made and that, like it or not, this condition—of ethical relativism—is what we have to live with and make the ‘best of’ … and we can.

Modernist disavowals and postmodern reminders of the condition of history today: On Jean François Lyotard

Arguing that modernist ‘epistemologically striving’ histories are constituted by what they disavow—that as a genre of literature history is necessarily, and primarily, the product of rhetorical figures and devices—Jean François Lyotards work is used here in order to remind historians of both the failure of the empirical/epistemological and the actual aesthetic construct that all histories are…and always have been. It is argued, further, that developing Lyotards idea of the immemorial, a way of considering ‘the before now’ as a kind of history—as if it were a history—opens up historical discourse to things it could be but has not yet been.

Editorial: On Sande Cohen

Sande Cohen, School of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts, is not – but he deserves to be – on every reading list of every university history course where the nature/location/function of ‘history today’ are examined. In a series of books (Historical Culture 1986; Academia and the Luster of Capital 1993; Passive Nihilism 1998 and History Out of Joint 2006), in various joint-edited texts, in numerous chapters, articles and papers stretching back to the 1970s (having previously undertaken a PhD with Hayden White), Cohen has ranged across contemporary cultural productions (history, art, aesthetics, literary and political theory, linguistics, philosophy, critical theory . . .), has dug deep into some of the more vital intellectual movements of the last few decades (let us collect these for convenience under the umbrella of postmodernism) and has ventured into areas occupied, not least, by such figures as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, de Man, Deleuze, et al. His ‘position’ – self-consciously located on the existential left tinctured by anarchism (opposition to all forms of authority) – has given his analyses of various manifestations of passive/reactive/ affirmative culture wherever he has found them (not least in contemporary capital), and the place of history therein, a power and prescience few